Twenty months after hearing oral argument on his appeal, the state Supreme Court on Tuesday affirmed the death penalty for Richard Poplawski, who killed three Pittsburgh police officers on April 4, 2009.
In a 63-page opinion, Justice Correale Stevens wrote that Poplawski's three death sentences "were not the product of passion, prejudice or any other arbitrary factor, but were based, instead, on overwhelming evidence establishing that [he] fatally shot Officers Paul Sciullo, Stephen Mayhle and Eric Kelly with malice and the specific intent to kill."
The officers were killed when they responded to Poplawski's home on Fairfield Street in Stanton Heights for a domestic dispute with his mother just after 7 a.m.. Poplawski, armed with multiple weapons and body armor, launched a gunfight that lasted for hours before he gave himself up.
A jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder in June 2011 and sentenced him to die.
Although the penalty for Poplawski has been affirmed, Gov. Tom Wolf issued a moratorium on capital punishment in Pennsylvania earlier this year while he awaits a report from a bi-partisan committee on how it is meted out. Last week, the state Supreme Court ruled that the governor had the right to issue the moratorium because it is temporary.
Poplawski raised several issues on appeal, including whether it was error to allow into evidence: his statements to police; racial epithets he made on a 911 call; his online visits to white nationalist websites; references by the prosecution during the penalty phase of Poplawski's "future dangerousness;" as well as still and video images of the officers' funerals.
The court found that any error in including the epithets was insignificant compared to the "highly relevant and probative 911 call," which overwhelmingly established his intent to kill the officers. As to the defense contention on future dangerousness, the court found that former deputy district attorney Mark V. Tranquilli was talking about Poplawski’s previous actions when he said, “I submit to you, Richard Poplawski got a taste and he liked it. He’s like a dog that’s bitten once and will bite again, and he did that day. Two more times.”
“[W]hen read both in its entirety and in context, it is a description of the past,” Justice Stevens wrote, although he said the comparison was “highly irregular and improper.”
Poplawski's defense attorney also argued to the court that her client deserved a new penalty hearing because of prosecutorial misconduct in appealing to the jurors’ emotions, by presenting graphic images, video and audio of the officers’ memorial services. At oral argument, on April 9, 2014, former Chief Justice Ronald Castille remarked that that evidence was inappropriate and could build in a new trial for Poplawski.
But neither Justice Castille, who retired at the end of last year, Justice Seamus McCaffery, who resigned last year, nor Justice Michael Eakin, who was suspended last week with pay, participated in Tuesday’s opinion.
Justice Stevens wrote that Poplawski did not object to the evidence at trial, and therefore he waived those issues on appeal.
However, in a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Thomas Saylor wrote that the behavior of the prosecutor during the sentencing phase, and the “apparent abuse of the latitude afforded to the prosecution to introduce victim-impact evidence” should be part of a “probing judicial assessment” in the post-conviction process and “may present an apt vehicle, on post-conviction review, for imposing some rational limits as a supervisory matter.”
Poplawski, 29, is being housed at the State Correctional Institution at Graterford. The public defender’s office, which represented him, had no comment.
First Published: December 29, 2015, 9:48 p.m.